


Her Finest Work

by seriousfic



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-02
Updated: 2013-11-02
Packaged: 2017-12-31 06:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1028576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seriousfic/pseuds/seriousfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What no one grasped was that plants lived a long time. Redwoods could live for hundreds of years. Next to them, a human lifespan was nothing at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Finest Work

The roses were coming in nicely. They had grown from the soil with deep roots, down all the way to the coffinwood. And like barbed wire, like poison ivy they circled the headstone to let all know to keep their distance. It was well-tended, too. Pamela visited every day to water them, and talk to them, and sometimes just feel the texture of their vibrant bulbs and pretend it was a warm cheek, a belly, a wrist, an expanse of skin instead.  
  
The plants did not talk back, save in a song she had once valued over the loud, annoying babble of humanity. She knew better now. Or if she was wrong, then she was locked in her error.   
  
She had thought Harley was so annoying. Maddening. Infuriating.   
  
The roses were Ivy’s own special breed. Black as sin, with a spot of red like a bloodstain right in the center. They grew on a vine that was persistent as the tide. It had already taken over the graveyard, but it only bloomed on her grave.   
  
The headstone was cracked, a neat line that ran through the middle of Harleen Mia Quinzel. Fracturing it. Pamela had had to insist on getting a headstone for her. Her last crime, and her last loot. There was the fear of defacement, always. So Pamela had stayed to protect it. And eventually she’d become the caretaker. It had just happened by sheer inertia.  
  
What no one grasped was that plants lived a long time. Long enough that if she grew stymied enough with the Bat, she could just wait to outlive him. Wait and see the Joker die, at last, neck broken in a circus funhouse. By Batman or by his own hand, it didn’t matter.  
  
Wait long enough for Harley to show up at her doorstep, greasepaint finally washed away by the tears she’d been holding in all those years. An idiot would’ve thought those tears were for the Joker. They were for herself.   
  
Time had swept the rock of the words, the dates, everything but the name and the single word that Pamela chiseled in a little deeper each year.  _Beloved_.   
  
Pamela had lived long enough to see Ra’s almost succeed, seen nature reclaim Gotham and then humanity fight its way back from the brink. She’d lived long enough to see Harley die, slowly, painfully, pointlessly. The only thing she hadn’t lived long enough to do was recreate the experiment that made her poison. That made her immortal. She would never live long enough to do that. It was already too late.  
  
The flowers, bloodstained red blooms on vines of pale green, were crept across the headstone in a lover’s embrace. Slowly widening the cracks. In time, they would break the headstone apart. Defeat death.   
  
Pamela could wait.


End file.
